AutoSec: Secure Automotive Data Transmission Scheme for In-Vehicle Networks

Modern vehicles comprise hundreds of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and sensors for enhancing numerous security and comfort-related functionalities. The ECUs perform real-time information exchange, such as automotive instructions over the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. However, the CAN bus architecture supports very limited security features. Thus, in-vehicle communications over CAN are vulnerable to critical security threats. Also, as ECUs are resource-constrained in nature, the continuous message transmissions lead to drain out of energy during inter-ECU communication if the authentication scheme is not cost-effective. This paper proposes AutoSec, a lightweight scheme, exploiting low-cost bit-wise XOR and concatenation operations to facilitate secure and efficient in-vehicle communications for connected vehicles. We show through qualitative analysis that AutoSec preserves the security properties of message integrity, user authentication, and message confidentiality. We implemented AutoSec on Raspberry Pi 3B+ and performed exhaustive experiments to validate the security robustness and lightweightness of AutoSec. The results show that AutoSec reduces the computation time by and energy consumption by .